My friend Bob—Robert, technically, but he's been Bob since we were twelve and he traded me his peanut butter sandwich for my Twinkie, a deal I still maintain was the worst trade in the history of human commerce and possibly the beginning of his problems with quantitative decision-making—Bob has gone all in.
Bob retired last year. Sold his accounting firm. Bought a Tesla that drives itself, which Bob considers a feature and I consider an admission of defeat. And joined what I can only describe as a cult, except cults usually have better music and more interesting robes.
"It's not a cult," Bob said, as we sat in his kitchen. His kitchen, I should note, looked like a laboratory designed by someone who really hated joy and wanted to make sure no joy could ever accidentally occur there. Everything was stainless steel and glass. There were no cookies. There were nutrient-dense macronutrient delivery vehicles that tasted like compressed sadness and looked like something you'd feed a very expensive hamster.
"Bob, you just told me you wake up at 4:30 AM to take a cold shower while listening to a podcast about biohacking hosted by a guy who used to sell supplements on late-night TV."
"That's not a cult. That's optimization. There's a difference. Cults don't have peer-reviewed studies."
"You have a Oura ring, a Whoop strap, a continuous glucose monitor, and something called a 'Muse headband' that you wear while meditating to tell you if you're meditating correctly. You have four devices to tell you if you're alive, Bob. You have more sensors than the Mars Rover."
Bob looked hurt. He pulled out his phone—no, not his phone, his device ecosystem—and showed me a graph that looked like the stock market if the stock market was having a very emotional day. "Look at this. My HRV last month. Look at that trend line. Upward. Consistent. My recovery scores are in the 90th percentile for men our age."
"Bob, we're sixty. There aren't that many men our age wearing all that equipment. You're comparing yourself to a self-selected group of obsessives who probably also alphabetize their spice racks and have strong opinions about sock fiber content."
"That's not—" he stopped. Checked something on his glucose monitor, which was buzzing with what I assumed was either an alert or just general concern about Bob's life choices. "Okay, actually, that's a fair point. The sample size for 60-year-old males with full biometric suites is relatively small and probably skewed toward people with anxiety disorders. But still. The science—"
"The science," I interrupted, "says that people who are happy live longer. Are you happy, Bob? When's the last time you were happy? Not 'optimized.' Not 'in a state of flow.' Not 'achieving peak cognitive performance.' Just... happy? Like, stupid, unmeasured, unquantified, possibly slightly drunk happy?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at his graph again. The graph didn't have an answer for this. The graph had never been asked about happiness before. The graph was uncomfortable.
"I mean... look at this trend line," he said, but his voice had lost some conviction. The trend line suddenly looked very lonely.
"Remember when we were twenty?" I asked. "You had that Chevy Nova. The one with the rust holes in the floor."
Bob smiled despite himself. It was a real smile, not an optimized one. "You could see the road through the passenger side. We called it 'scenic view mode.' My mother thought it was dangerous. We thought it was a feature."
"We drove to the beach that summer. No GPS. No phone. Just a map that we bought at a gas station from a guy who was smoking a cigarette and looked like he might have been in witness protection. We got lost for three hours and it was the best day of my life."
"We got lost because you refused to ask for directions," Bob pointed out. "You said 'real men don't ask for directions, we navigate by the stars.' It was three in the afternoon."
"Best three hours of my life," I said. And I meant it. I could still feel the sun coming through that rust hole, still hear the radio playing something by Springsteen, still taste the cheap beer and the salt air and the freedom of being twenty and lost and not having any idea what an HRV was and not caring. "When's the last time you got lost, Bob? Really lost? Not 'my GPS recalculated' lost. Not 'I took a wrong turn and the algorithm fixed it in thirty seconds' lost. I mean lost lost. Existentially lost. The kind of lost where you find something you didn't know you were looking for."
He didn't answer. He was looking at his glucose monitor, which was buzzing again, possibly with concern, possibly with envy.
"Your blood sugar?" I asked.
"No," he said quietly. "Reminder to take my magnesium supplement. Timing it with my circadian rhythm. I have to take it exactly 47 minutes before bed or my sleep architecture will be suboptimal."
I left Bob's house that afternoon feeling like I'd visited a museum exhibit. Man Before Algorithms: A Retrospective. There was my friend, trapped in a web of data points, each one telling him he was doing great while he slowly forgot how to just... be. How to exist without measurement. How to live without optimization.
I drove home. I got lost on purpose. It took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get home. I found a taco truck I didn't know existed. I ate three tacos without checking their macronutrient profile. I didn't know what my HRV was doing. It was glorious.